I returned from the Saturday’s fantastic fun filled ride around 10pm, took a hot shower and watched the Tour de France Time trail race till 11pm before going to bed. What are those guys made of? How can they ride like that? Riding 15.5km in 19.xx minutes? Get them out of my sight. They are insulting the budding cyclist in me big-time and giving him a huge complex!



There was a message from the HussainSagar area chapter of HBC reminding me of the ride in the area. I thought, I would not be able to make it but deferred sending out a message to Habib till morning to see how the body and mind feels after a night’s rest.

The excitement of the ride I just came back from was so much that I found myself trying hard to get some sleep to give the tired body some rest. I found myself awake many instances throughout the night but refused to get out of bed. Finally, when I got out of bed, the time was 5am. I went through the routine of getting freshened up with the morning ablutions without making a decision about the ride. The body was feeling alright after a couple of stretches and around 5:30am I filled up a bottle of water and decided to go for it.

By the time I got down and started, it was 5:40am round about the same time I started for the last week’s ride. This time though, I did not want to message the group to wait for me as I was not sure how much I could push myself after an 80km ride less than 8 hour ago. If I got delayed, I would join them by riding in the opposite direction on the lap, I thought.

Started the Nokia sports tracker on my phone and started off without waiting for the GPS signal to catch-up. As, I began to pedal slowly in lower gears, I felt the legs responding nicely warmed up. With in no time, I began to increase the cadence and began to race. The traffic, I felt, was more than usual this Sunday morning compared last week’s. I think for some reason most of the people today were excited like me and could not sleep much. They were on the roads much before than usual.

10 minutes into the ride, I was passing Kukatpally. While I was riding in a hurry, I was watchful for any signs of fatigue from my body. In the rush to reach there on time, I do not want to ignore any signals it may be sending to slow down and relax. It felt alright and I continued cranking up decent pace. Now, I wanted to see if I can better my previous week’s 31kmph average speed. After all I watched a bit of time trail race the night before. 🙂

Carefully navigating through the morning traffic that is steadily building up, I reached Prasad’s Imax where the group was waiting. I checked the time and it was 33mins and 26secs. It’s exactly 39 seconds more than that of last week. That meant that I still managed an average of above 30kmph. Not bad considering all the apprehensions I had of stressing my body out with rides on consecutive days when I began.

After a couple of handshakes we are good to go. There were a couple of new riders this time as well. They were new at least to me. One was Ranga on his Trek3700 and another was Mr. Subba rao on his BSA Photon single speed. I called Ravi Kiran who has still not reached there and dragged him out of bed. Poor guy later told me that a support call kept him awake till 2am last night. But, he obliged my over enthusiastic call for him to be there and told me he would join the group by riding in the opposite direction. Another Ravi Kiran who was supposed to come could not make it as he had a flat tire which he noticed just before starting. At that hour of the day, there is little chance of finding a shop open to fix the flat. So he called in disappointed, that he could not join the ride.

So, we (Ramany, Jwala, Habib, Nimesh, Subbu, Ranga and I) started our gentle ride around the Lake. Habib wanted to try my Hawk and I rode his single speed MTB. The skies were overcast and pleasant as we completed a lap and stopped to chat for a while. We decided to ride another lap around the lake and this time I traded my hawk for Ranga’s Trek3700. We rode at gentle pace and stopped for a few photographs from the ramp nearing the end of the lap. Nimesh who rode on without noticing that the group stopped noticing that his Cannondale F8 had a flat back tire and was waiting for us at the starting point.

Ramany and Jwala left homebound towards Sec’bad while Habib, Ravi, Nimesh and Subbu went out to find a shop to get the flat tire fixed. Luckily there was a shop that Habib knew which was close to Imax and we walked there. While, the guy was mending the flat, I could not stop myself from indulging in a sumptuous breakfast. Ravi, Subbu and I had a nice breakfast on at a roadside eatery and Nimesh joined us later. We sat there eating as had a couple of ‘Say Bajji’ moments captured on my camera. As we sat there eating, Habib noticed my bald head for the first time and found it amusing enough to take a few close-up snaps of it. 🙂

After refueling with the breakfast, we set out homewards. Habib parted ways at lakadi-ka-phool area. Subbu and Nimesh gave, Ravi and I, company till halfway as we headed towards Banjara hills road#1 area so that we can take the exhilarating downhill beside Taj Krishna. That meant we had to handle a steady climb to reach there first. The excitement of the downhill was worth the effort. For a few seconds of heady rush, toiling for many minutes climbing might sound mad for a few but if you try it, you will understand that only a smooth downhill can give us such a high!!

Once we had that shot of adrenaline, I bid adieu to Ravi and headed homewards towards Miyapur and reached there by 9:45am. This 60km ride following the exciting 80km ride the evening before meant that I have covered about 140km from 3pm on Saturday till 10am on Sunday with a bit of excited half sleep thrown in between. Not that great. But not that bad either. I can think of multiday rides (no I am not thinking of Tour de France.. he he..) if I keep going at this rate.



Here is the link to the photos:

http://picasaweb.google.com/hivenkat.d/HussainSagarRide20090705#